Ashley Padilla came close to walking away from comedy altogether before Saturday Night Live came calling.
“My SNL audition process was crazy,” the breakout star tells Gold Derby. “They had heard of my show [at The Groundlings]. I was about to quit comedy, and my manager was like, ‘Let me try one more thing. Let’s put your best stuff in one show.’ And she was right! Someone heard about this and came to go see my show, Party of Three, and they were like, ‘We want her to showcase right after the show.'”
Padilla explains how she was asked to perform two separate tests for her audition: “After the first test, I was like, ‘That was pretty dang good.’ But they were like, ‘We want you to come back and try it again.’ And a brand new five minutes. So I’d done all my best stuff, and had to bring my not-very-good stuff, but funny enough. I have actually been told in the halls that that was the better test. I’m like, ‘Maybe I was just trying too hard on the first one.’ You’ve got to be loose and have a good time.”
The actress and sketch writer will never forget when her first scene made it to air, during the episode hosted by Bill Burr on Nov. 9, 2024. “I did this at The Groundlings, but a little differently,” she says. “It’s a woman who’s trying to tell a joke with everyone, but hers is more of a story, and it’s not very good, and it’s about dogs, and everyone’s like, ‘Cool.’ It’s someone who’s trying to be a part of the group.”
Former Saturday Night Live cast member Kristen Wiig gave Padilla her “best piece of advice” on the show: “Just have fun. And I saw her having fun. She came and did some stuff for the 50th season.”
After working in comedy for years, Padilla is just starting to be recognized by fans. “It first hit me that my work was resonating with people when I started being told on the street,” she declares. “Someone would be like, ‘You’re so funny on SNL,’ and I’d be like, ‘How do you know I’m on SNL?’ That blew my mind. For so long I’ve been doing it where no one knew I was doing anything, because I wasn’t big online or anything. So to see someone recognize my work on the street because they watched it at home and laughed, that kills me. I love when it happens.”
The idea behind “Two People Who Just Hooked Up” started because Padilla and Andrew Dismukes were bantering behind the scenes one day: “We were waiting for a sketch to start and we started messing around and we were playing a couple who was fighting and being sarcastic. So I was like, ‘What if we did two people who just got in a fight or something and they have to come on here?’ And then I was in the shower a week later and I was like, ‘What if it’s two people that just hooked up?’ I texted him and he was like, ‘Let’s do it.'”
The “Mom Confession” sketch starred Padilla as a mother who realizes she was wrong about Trump. “That week before had just been really hard in the news and everything felt really bleak,” she recalls. “I came in on a Monday and I went to [head writer] Alison Gates and I was like, ‘I really want to say something. I want to do something, but in my voice, because I don’t typically write political sketches.’ … How can we say something funny without being too preachy?”
The “Passing Notes” concept with guest host Ryan Gosling came about when Mikey Day was in rehearsal “writing notes about me to make Marcello [Hernández] and Kenan [Thompson] laugh. I would walk up and read it for the first time and it was really killing them. And I was like, ‘Mikey, this is a sketch.’ I didn’t know that they would ever let us do something like that, but it really worked.” She adds, “I did help write that sketch, but I did not know what it would be and I was terrified. I’ve never been so scared in my life. It felt like I was jumping off a bridge and I let Mikey and Streeter [Seidell] and Alison build a net.”
Fans have long speculated whether showrunner Lorne Michaels likes when people break. “He knows that things should feel real,” Padilla surmises. “I’m not a huge breaker, but in ‘Cyclops,’ for example, when Ryan Gosling and Mikey are essentially rushing me on live television, I had a moment where it was a release of tension of like, ‘Stop it!’ So I think if it’s genuine, it’s OK.” She then whispers, “Or maybe he hated it and I just don’t know and no one told me.”
Whenever Gosling comes to set, Michaels claims the show takes on the actor’s spirit, a sentiment Padilla agrees with. “That’s exactly what happened, because I felt possessed,” she states. “He was making me laugh so hard.”
The viral “Haircut” sketch was inspired from real life. “I shaved my head because I wanted a pixie,” Padilla explains. “I love a pixie, but I needed to do it myself. I thought you shaved your head — and you don’t. And I can tell everyone out there, ‘Don’t do it. It’s not what you’re supposed to do.'” The actress loves the “cognitive dissonance” of the dinner scene, with the character trying to put on a brave face even though she’s “dying inside.”
Padilla’s personal SNL hero is Gilda Radner, telling us, “From time to time, I will just go watch a moment between her and Candice Bergen where Candice calls her an idiot but says the wrong name. And then the way Gilda turns to camera and knows her next line and knows it’s going to work, she doesn’t break, she just has such a presence.” Wiig and Will Ferrell are her other heroes.
Emmy buzz has been circling Padilla all season long, though she readily admits it’s a foreign concept: “It doesn’t make sense in my brain. It’s wild to me that anyone likes anything I’m doing, period. The thought of then receiving some sort of award for it, especially as a prestigious, beautiful thing, I can’t think about it too much because then I’m in ‘Crazyville,’ and I’m not right in the head, and something’s wrong with me, because I don’t believe it’s possible. I just feel lucky to be here at all.”
As for her No. 1 choice for a dream host, she looks backward to someone the industry lost recently. “I wish I would’ve seen Diane Keaton do it,” she confesses. “I think that she was the funniest person ever. She would’ve killed it and stole the show and the show would’ve gotten canceled after because she would’ve been so funny that they couldn’t have topped it.”
Finally, Padilla has one suggestion for the network censors: “I wish NBC would let us do F-bombs, but alas, we’re not allowed. I love a good F-bomb and it’s frankly how I was raised. I was raised like a pirate. I mean, we just curse and you don’t think about it. So, it’s in my bones.”
